USA 2 :: Korea 0

Well the US did well in their first match as far as a result goes taking it 2::0 after the halftime. More interesting to me however was the match through the referee, and some of the crazy comments after.

For anyone interested, the referees were:
Referee: Bibiana STEINHAUS (GER)

Assistant Referee 1: Marina WOZNIAK (GER)

Assistant Referee 2: Katrin RAFALSKI (GER)

Fourth official: Gyoengyi GAAL (HUN)

This referee is interesting. She is the ONLY woman referee in German professional football, and a police officer to boot (shades of Howard Webb).

Her FIFA profile can be found here, Facebook page here, and personal (authorized) website here. You just have to love the information age.

The match itself (again from a refereeing perspective) to me was boring. A full match summary is here, and the official report is here (.pdf). Just looking at the summary (below), you can get the sense there was really not a lot going on by the way for fouls and misconduct, and this referee did not have to get too involved.

USAPRK

19	Shots	13
8	Corner kicks	4
0	Yellow cards	0
0	Second yellow card and red card	0
0	Red Cards	0
53%	Possession (%)	47%

One of the more interesting parts came after the match, where the Korea coach Kim Kwang-Min when asked about his teams (lack of) performance, came up with a doosey. Quoting the coach (source):

"When we stayed in Pyongyang during training there was an unexpected accident so our team was not capable of playing. Our players were hit by lightning during a training match. More than five were hospitalised. The match was on 8 June."

Well, at least he did not blame the referee.